Posted
by
ScuttleMonkeyon Monday May 08, 2006 @09:28PM
from the user-friendly-depends-so-much-on-the-user dept.

GeekyBodhi writes "FOSSEngineer.com has an interview with a couple of guys from the PC-BSD development team after the distro recently released their first stable version 1.0. PC-BSD is built on top of FreeBSD and aims to dumb down installation and daily usage, enabling a non-technical user to run it as his primary desktop. The guys talk about their pre-release journey, features unique to PC-BSD and why a minimal installation system is a good thing."

On Debian-based systems, you can have multiple apt sources. That means that you can have several CDs [or DVDs] of software that is typically installed and fail over to net install when you want something that's not on optical media.

As for a GNOME-based distro like this, download an Ubuntu CD/DVD set. It will automatically set it up to access all your discs and you can choose [or choose not] to set up access to net repositories.

There are currently 4 bsd projects that i'm aware of. They include FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD. In addition to these projects which each develop their own kernel and userland, there are linux style distros PC-BSD and DesktopBSD which do not develop their own kernel or low level userland. (they add gui shit) These two track freebsd progress as well as other projects like frenzy that do live cds.

Just to add to what you've listed, there are some lesser-known but quite interesting *BSD projects out there.

AnonymOS, an OpenBSD 3.8-based LiveCD with strong encryption and a preconfigured TOR proxy service for net anonymoity.

There may be other projects, but those are the ones I'm familiar with. They are all very nice, and worth a try.

As to PC-BSD, I'm more knowledgeable than the average PC user, but I found PC-BSD to be quite impressive and usable, without being too terribly dumbed-down.My G/F (Yes, I have one, but I'm 48 and also play lead guitar in a gigging and recording blues band.:-P) actually prefers it over XP or Mandriva.

The.PBI software packages aren't too numerous as yet, but there has been steady development with new.PBIs appearing at a fast enough pace that I'm sure the number will be respectable before too long.

Bravo, laffer! I wish you luck with MidnightBSD, and I'll keep checking that URL. I look forward to any new ideas being applied to FreeBSD, as it seems a very solid base, and IMHO has not been taken anywhere near its' capabilities yet as a desktop.

The FreeBSD Foundation has a license with Sun Microsystems to distribute FreeBSD binaries for the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and Java Development Kit (JDK). These implementations have been made possible through the hard work of the FreeBSD Java team as well as through donations to the FreeBSD Foundation that supported hardware, developer costs, and legal fees.
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/downloads/java.sh tml [freebsdfoundation.org]

Additionally, there's OliveBSD [paderni.free.fr], which is based on OpenBSD 3.8. From the website:OliveBSD is a LiveCD based on OpenBSD 3.8 with graphical environment and various softwares like Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, Gaim, Xmms, etc.

I installed OpenBSD 3.9, just to test -- why did I never try bsd before in all those years, after all ? Well,.. it felt even slower -- probably because of X11 though.

OpenBSD really is slower. However, that's because of its security functionality (cryptographically random process IDs and encrypted swap, anyone?) and not because of poor design. My understanding is that a crypto accelerator board actually makes all of OpenBSD quite a lot quicker but I haven't personally used one and can't vouch for them.